NBN: Connecting all Australians
The Australian Greens support the building of a Fibre to the Home National Broadband Network because we know the NBN will create enormous opportunities for Australia's future. The NBN needs to be public, transparent, fast and unfiltered.
Greens have worked to improve the NBN at every step of planning and legislation that preceded fibre roll out.
The Greens won amendments to ensure that any future moves to privatise the NBN will be subject to a review to protect the public interest and will require the approval of Parliament. Initially the Government planned to sell the network to the private sector upon completion.
The Greens support the business model that sees the cities subsidise the bush. It is going to be more expensive to roll out the NBN in regional and rural areas - Australia is a big country but we should be treated equally and be able to access services no matter where we live.
The Greens insisted on amendments that ensured information about the roll out of the NBN was available under the Freedom of Information Act - it's a huge project and it's strongly in the public interest to know how it's going. Initial government legislation exempted it from FOI scrutiny.
The Greens worked with the government to structurally separate Telstra's wholesale arm - to repair the damage that was caused when Telstra was privatised. The impact of a vertically integrated state owned monopoly being in the market was that competition was squashed and monopoly power was leveraged into new markets.